We don’t need a flurry of onetime impoundings for the cameras, we need unroadworthy vehicles to be pulled off every time.
There can be few people who were not left devastated by the reports of the fatal Vanderbijlpark scholar transport crash last Monday that claimed 14 lives.
If there’s anything heartening to emerge from this terrible tragedy, it is that we are not inured to the carnage on our roads – yet.
But the problem is that most of the outrage is just anger. It is an anger about a system people believe is failing them and those poor innocent children jammed into a vehicle that was equipped to carry far less – and not even roadworthy.
It is an anger about a country where township education has become discredited, despite the millions spent on it, and that desperate parents will pay for their kids to be ferried to other schools to get a chance at life.
It is an anger at how the driver could be allowed to drive without a licence – and then to behave the way he did.
If you haven’t yet, but you have the stomach for it, go to anticrime activist Yusuf Abramjee’s X-page (@abramjee). He posted the dashcam footage from the truck that the taxi ploughed into.
ALSO READ: Use shock tactics for drivers
If there was ever a smoking gun, it’s that. It’s an open and shut case and the driver should be sent to jail.
But there are no guarantees in life, especially not in our overcrowded justice system, staffed by overloaded, underpaid and often disrespected prosecuting staff working on dockets prepared by detectives whose lot matches their own… and then some.
Despite this, the general outcry has been towards the promulgation of even stiffer laws to punish bad driving, as well as the old hardy annual of dropping the permitted blood alcohol level to nil, with calls for lifetime bans for driving for the miscreants.
We don’t need more laws, we need the ones we have to be applied. We don’t need a flurry of onetime impoundings for the cameras, we need unroadworthy vehicles to be pulled off every time.
We need reckless and/or drunk drivers taken off the roads permanently. We need consequences. And it starts at the very beginning: we must be strict about how we licence our drivers, as deputy editor Brendan Seery noted in his column on Friday.
Too many people are getting licences via loopholes, or downright bribery. If we want to be really outraged, let’s be angry about those who perpetuate this system.
NOW READ: Vanderbijlpark tragedy exposes systemic failures in scholar transport safety
